“The Dark Side of the Plastic Age”

DR. REBECCA ALTMAN:
Plastics are not just the finished good, but an entire system of related chemistries and such that the globe is a network of places that feed into this industry, that supply one piece of the puzzle. It's not just the bottle fragmenting in the ocean, but all of the places that make components of that bottle, um, and all of the people whose lives were touched along, along that way.

DR. CHELSEA ROCHMAN:
I would be very surprised if, we stopped using the material full stop. So I don't think there will be a world without plastic. And even when we go extinct, there will be like, it will be the marker of the Anthropocene there be plastic, but who knows what might dig out if that happens, right, people will find plastic as a signature of our society.

JOHN RAFFERTY:
Hi, I’m John Rafferty, I am the editor for Earth Sciences at Encyclopaedia Britannica. In this episode, we’ll explore one of the most perplexing environmental challenges: the problem of plastic pollution.

Plastics are vexing because each of us know how useful they are. They keep our food fresh, our vehicles light, our medical supplies sterile, and even our trash smelling clean. They can be shaped into countless useful products, including artificial organs, tools, containers, furniture, carpeting, parts for aircraft, trains, and trucks, and toys.

But what happens when their usefulness ends. Unlike fruit peels and rinds, and things made of wood, rock, and even metal, plastics do not break down easily. Instead they flake, crack, and break into tiny bits and pieces each of which cannot be easily reabsorbed back into ecosystems and nutrient cycles, so we humans need to either store or recycle plastic waste. However, plastic waste is often disposed of improperly. It gets into our waterways, fouling beaches and riverbanks, and winding up in the oceans—much of it floating in huge, spinning garbage patches.

Plastic pollution is remarkable, in that its manufacturing process contributes to global warming (since the feedstock for modern plastics is largely oil) and pollution in general, while plastic wastes contribute to marine biodiversity loss (since these materials are hazardous to birds and marine life in different ways). It even affects human health. So, even though we love how useful plastic things are, this convenience comes at a cost—a cost that is rapidly increasing.

Today, we will explore plastic’s chemistry and how plastic pollution affects various species in the environment including our own. To help us with that part, I reached out to Dr. Chelsea Rochman.

CHELSEA ROCHMAN:
My name is Chelsea Rochman and I am a professor at the University of Toronto. I'm an aquatic ecologist and also an eco toxicologist. So I look at how anthropogenic stressors or things that we've put in the environment, how they affect you.

JOHN RAFFERTY:
But plastics have another side, a sociological and historical side. For this, I enlisted the help of Dr. Rebecca Altman.

REBECCA ALTMAN:
I am by training an environmental sociologist. I have a PhD from Brown University. Right now I've stepped away from academia and I'm exclusively writing about plastics and chemical history for the public.

JOHN RAFFERTY:
So, by the end of this episode I hope that you will have good understanding of what plastic is, how its manufacture evolved through history (given the different economic and social forces that influenced its development), the dangers of plastic pollution to people and wildlife, and what all of us can do to reduce the harmful impact of these materials.

CHELSEA ROCHMAN:
Yeah. So what is plastic? I guess when we think about a lot of chemical contaminants in the environment, we think about something we can't see, and we think about maybe a small molecule. If I, I could draw for you, what, for example, the pesticide DDT looks like, but if you ask me to draw plastic, then I'm getting into like a long chain of these different molecules. And so what plastic is, is, is just such a big chain of these molecules and diverse molecules put together that makes a physical material that's durable and that's persistent, and that we can picture, you know, we know what plastic is, it's the, it's a fishing net. It's the yogurt container that I had my breakfast out of. It's a, the little plastic microbeads in my face wash. Chemically, they're all very diverse. And that's because if I want plastic to be as stretchy and, and, uh, durable like a yoga mat, it's going to be made out of something very different than a fishing net, which is going to be made out of something very different than the PVC pipe that carries all of our drinking water to our houses.

JOHN RAFFERTY:
Plastic is a material made from chemical polymers derived from cellulose, coal, natural gas, salt and of course, crude oil. With a bit heat and pressure, plastic can be molded into nearly any shape. Plastics are tough, low density materials, capable of performing many of the same jobs that heavier materials (such as ceramics and metals) can do but without the cost in weight. Plastic has low electrical conductivity, and it can even be made transparent. Some of the types of plastic that most of us are familiar with include:

• polyethylene terephthalate (PET), which is used to make bottles that hold beverages and other liquids,
• polyvinyl chloride (PVC), which is used for weatherproof piping and garden hoses,
• polystyrene, or Styrofoam which is used to make insulated food containers
• and polymethyl methacrylate, which is used to make shatterproof windows or plexiglass.

In industry, plastics are thought of as either “commodity” resins or “specialty” resins. Commodity resins are plastics that are produced at high volume and low cost for the most common disposable items and durable goods.

Specialty resins are made-to-order plastics that perform specific jobs, so they are produced at low volume and at higher cost. Engineering plastics (or engineering resins) are part of this group. These materials can substitute for die-cast metals in plumbing, hardware, and automotive manufacturing. Familiar engineering plastics include nylon, Teflon, polycarbonate, and epoxy.

Chemically speaking, plastics begin with carbon and hydrogen.

CHELSEA ROCHMAN:
They all have carbon and hydrogen. Carbon is the building block for plastic. And so when we think about a carbon cycle, um, plastic could be part of it. Your simplest plastic polyethylene, or polypropylene that are very common, they're just a carbon hydrogen chain. When you get more complex into PVC and like PVC pipe, then you're actually adding, uh, there's a chlorine in there and vinyl chloride. So you, it starts with carbon and hydrogen and it grows out from there.

JOHN RAFFERTY:
Like just about every other invention, plastic came from humble origins before developing into the specialized types we see today, as Dr. Altman explains:

REBECCA ALTMAN:
There are lots of different types of plastics and there's different kind of eras or generations of plastics. So if we want to go to, let's say the Victorian era, middle of the 19th century, there was an industrial plastic called Gutta percha. You know, it was manufactured using, um, resin from a tree, but it was harvested and used to, to, uh, line the undersea, um, telegraph cables. Uh, it was in a very important industry, um, of that era. I mean, this was the way that for example, Britain administered its empire. From these early kind of plastics, moldable materials, they're based out of some kind of material that comes from a tree or a stalk. Um, you have, uh, kind of the next generation of plastics to come out of that and slightly manipulated the base plant material.

So celluloid plastics, which we think of as associated with film. But before that, there was, scientists tinkering around with cellulose, celluloid based, uh, plastics that was, you know, late 19th century into the early part of the 20th century. And then we start getting into plastics that are kind of further and further, um, from kind of the natural based material where chemistry is used to change materials multiple times over and then use new heat and pressure. So out of that comes for example, Bakelite, um, which once formed was solid and an meltable, um, and that was, were used for car parts, um, and bringing your casings and telephones, and then thanks to Coco Chanel bangles, which would rim the line the wrists of, uh, women in the thirties. And then with the advent of polystyrene in the late twenties, early thirties, uh, and then followed by polyethylene, you have another category of plastics that were essentially re-meltable and moldable multiple times over. And that really opened up opportunities for, uh, further use for injection molding to basically be able to melt and pour the plastic into forms, and then to become objects that we would recognize that as like, like a cup, a spoon. So plastics use has changed over time. Plastics, material base has changed over time, and then it's cultural meanings has changed over time as well.

JOHN RAFFERTY:
The development of plastic didn’t happen on its own. Like everything else, it was affected by changes in the economy at global and national scales and the desire for novel kinds of products, but something else was at work here too—high-pressure sales tactics.

REBECCA ALTMAN:
The way that I began to think about it is the way that the materials economy has roughly tracked with changes in development, in the energy economy. And what I mean by that is that the degree to which plastics are produced right now is a reflection of the kind of energy system we have, which is based off of the extraction of fossil fuels. And so how that is priced, how fossil fuels work in the world is directly related to how cheap it is to make plastics. And so I think that's part of the answer.

But the other part of the answer is that plastics is a diverse plastics is a diverse array of materials that we have been sold as a society and convinced to use and convinced to use in particular ways that drive up their use.

The idea of a manufactured good, uh, being disposable after use after even 30 seconds of use was something that was taught to society to be able to do. Plastics early on were not made for single use and quick disposal, but that took time to develop that took marketing and advertising, that took lobbying, that took decades, uh, for that idea to take hold and for plastics, particularly plastic packaging to become such a widespread use. That's part of the story. The other story is that industrial plastics come onto the scene in tandem with other major industries. Uh, you talked about the rise of petroleum being one of them, but also the rise of the car, the rise of the industrial cigarette, the rise of telecommunications, and all of these industries made use of plastics technology. Plastics helped those industries succeed and vice versa.

For example, with Bakelite, the basic chemistry to form Bakelite was derived in part from coal chemistry and in part from wood chemistry, methanol. And so, you know, here's this era where coal is King and also wood and biomass are still quite prevalent. And as the oil industry became, um, more and more established, particularly in the United States, you see companies like Union Carbide begin to develop petroleum chemistry. And in fact, marry those two industries, such that, you know, petroleum plus chemistry gets to petrochemistry, where oil and natural gas served as the basic feedstocks for subsequent era plastics.

It is impossible to talk about the rise and proliferation of plastics without talking about geopolitics. What I mean by that is that so much of the plastics that are major categories of plastics right now, the infrastructure to make that, the technology to make that, many of them were either developed or expanded during World War II, for example. And so it's important to consider the role of, of war and nationalism, uh, in setting the stage for, for plastics to take off in the middle and latter part of the 20th century.

The American experience with plastics has been shaped by the industry itself working to create demand where there wasn't. I mean, you know, plastics had to be sold to the consumer all the time. And again, with each new category of resin, um, there was a certain level of convincing that had to happen. And then the public had to be taught to throw away goods and to repurchase them. Um, the whole American experience of plastics has been shaped by this idea that there isn't a way in which to toss away in which the people whoAre, who inhabit that place are somehow not. Um, I guess what I'm trying to say is that, you know, that the idea of plastics as possible because the costs of them not being, you know, there's, hasn't been a full and total accounting on what it actually costs to make plastic, both from extraction all the way through. I think one of the most important developments that has happened, I would say in the last five years is a connecting of the dots such that plastics isn't seen as a separate problem, but as deeply intertwined with the other, other major environmental and social pricings of the early 21st century.

Plastics and climate share a root, they share a root in the extraction of fossil fuels as the primary means to not just fuel society, you know, for transportation, but also to outfit it with its material goods. And so, the idea of plastics contributing to climate change and also being related to climate change is an important one.

JOHN RAFFERTY:
The manufacturing process requires heat, and this heat often comes from the burning of fossil fuels, which, as we know, contributes to global warming and influences climate. Although plastic manufacturing also requires heat and power to create a finished plastic item, the act of making something out of plastic also creates other forms of pollution, and chemicals leached from plastics into air and water is an emerging area of concern. Some compounds used in plastics, such as phthalates, bisphenol A (BPA), and polybrominated diphenyl ether (PBDE), have come under close scrutiny and regulation.

All of these compounds have been detected in humans and are known to disrupt the human endocrine system. Phthalates act against male hormones and are therefore known as anti-androgens; BPA mimics the natural female hormone estrogen; and PBDE has been shown to disrupt thyroid hormones in addition to being an anti-androgen. The people most vulnerable to such hormone-disrupting chemicals are children and women of reproductive age.
These chemicals are associated with hormone disruption in other animals, and amphibians, mollusks, worms, insects, crustaceans, and fish show effects on their reproduction and development, including alterations in the number of offspring produced, disruption of larval development, and (in insects) delayed adult emergence.

Hundreds of millions of metric tons of plastic are produced each year.

CHELSEA ROCHMAN:
I don't know if you've seen the movie, The Graduate, there's a very famous saying where I'm going to butcher who the actors are, but whoever it is turns to Dustin Hoffman and says, you know, the future is in his plastic, telling him, start your career in this material. It's booming, it's cheap, it's durable. And in the, in the beginning around the 1950s, you know, we produced very little of this material about 50 million metric tons per year. And now we produce, you know, 350 million metric tons per year and growing.

JOHN RAFFERTY:
Most of this production is not recycled. And our own experience—of plastic wrappers, bottles, containers, and other debris along streets and highways, near trash cans and landfills—tells us that not all of the plastic produced is disposed of properly. A lot of plastic is out there, and some of it finds its way into rivers, and streams—and, ultimately, the oceans.

A recent study estimated that some 19 to 23 million metric tons, or 11%, of plastic waste generated globally in 2016 made its way into oceans, rivers, lakes, and wetlands. By 2030, the amount of plastic entering the oceans may reach 53 million metric tons [or 58 million US tons] per year.

To put this in perspective, without fuel, passengers, or luggage, an average 737 commercial jet weighs 45 tons. 58 million tons is close to the weight of 1.3 million 737s. Imagine if this amount of material were released into our oceans and other waterways every single year!

To better understand this, and develop solutions to stem the flow of plastic from its emission sources, scientists have begun to look for patterns in how plastic debris makes it into the ocean.

CHELSEA ROCHMAN:
People will, so people have looked at river emissions and people have also just looked at emissions per country, which a lot of it comes from rivers and there are places in the world, but that do produce and met a lot more plastic pollution than others. And they tend to be in a upper middle income, I think is what it is, but it's your, it's your developing countries, but that are developing rapidly. So they're using more and more of this material. So they have a lot of the plastic, but they don't have the waste management infrastructure to support the use of those materials. So, uh, Vietnam, China, Indonesia, Philippines come out in an, in a model estimate of some of the top polluters of plastic around the world. And it's not because they're bad. It's because it's because of what I just said, their economy is growing.

They're becoming more developed, but they don't have the waste management infrastructure in place. So there are estimates out there that if you just increase the waste management infrastructure around the world, in these locations, you could stem, you know, 50% of the amount of plastic going into the ocean. But when you just do the waste management piece, you also want to do it sustainably so that it is truly growing into a circular economy so that you also minimize the amount of virgin material that's used because with our growing population around the world and our growing, uh, investment in oil and plastic, models will suggest that you can't just waste manage your way out of this. So, um, so yes, it would be really important to focus in these key regions, but we can't do just that to really stop the flow because even, even us, you know, developing countries in North America, um, we still, we still have quite a bit of a plastic problem.

It's something that's not accounted for in any of these models. And, uh, you know, when we in North America say, well, you know, we manage 99% of our waste. Well, yes, but some of that is shipped overseas to these same places that don't have the infrastructure for them to, to manage. Right? And how managed is it when it lands there? So this is where I say, um, it's tricky, right? I think it's really important to focus on the waste management infrastructure in these locations, but we also need to work on the waste management infrastructure at home so that we don't have to ship our waste overseas.

JOHN RAFFERTY:
The first oceanographic study to examine the amount of near-surface plastic debris in the world’s oceans was published in 2014. It estimated that at least 5.25 trillion individual pieces of plastic were floating on or near the surface.

Floating plastic waste has been shown to collect in five subtropical gyres in Earth’s oceans. Gyres are vast circular systems of ocean currents that spiral about a central point. Within each of these gyres are “garbage patches” (zones with high concentrations of plastic waste circulating near the ocean surface). The garbage patches in the North and South Pacific oceans have grabbed the most attention.

Now we shouldn’t think of these as swirling landfills at sea filled with piles of plastic bags, take-out containers, and so on. Wave action, salt, and sunlight make plastic brittle, so it breaks down into smaller and smaller pieces. When it gets small enough, that is, under a fifth of an inch in length, it’s considered microplastic.

Microplastics can be made this way, but they also occur in products like cosmetics, exfoliating beads in body washes, and as tiny fibers of synthetic clothing. By 2018, microplastics had been discovered in the organs of more than 100 aquatic species, including some found only in the deepest ocean trenches. By 2020, scientists estimated that at least 14 million metric tons of microplastic rested on the floor of the ocean, including hotspots containing nearly two million microplastic pieces per square metre (about 186,000 pieces per square foot).

So, what does all of this plastic in the oceans do to birds and marine life?

CHELSEA ROCHMAN:
I guess the I'll start with the bigger stuff, because you can imagine it, you know, we've seen images of albatross and other seabirds with bellies full of plastic, and of course, that can cause them to feel full and can cause mortality and we've seen it. It can cause them to like actually lacerate or rip the gut, the gut itself, which can also be the cause of death. So then, you know, if, if an animal swallows a big piece and it's able to egest it, so it's either excreted or sometimes with birds, they can actually throw it back up after they eat it. It's trying to think of better words for that, but when they eat so much of it, sometimes it gets stuck in their stomach or if it's so big.

So that's the big stuff. Now imagine that with small microplastics animals at every level of the food chain are now exposed to it. And, um, and so we know that in an, in a large organism that swallowing lots of plastic bags can kill a whale and lots of bottle caps can kill a bird. Well, it also seems as following lots of small pieces of microplastic for a small animal can also cause physical damage. So there's evidence that, um, even without the chemicals associated with them, microplastics can cause harm, but we've seen in some of these smaller critters that are at the lower levels of the food chain, the ingestion of microplastic can also have a chemical effect that interacts with the reproductive system, for example. So there's a paper where oysters were exposed to microplastics and they produce less offspring and the offspring were less likely to survive.

We've seen evidence of that also in zooplankton. Um, and then in fish, less evidence of, uh, reproductive, decreased reproductive output. But we have seen evidence of tumor promotion in the liver and decreases in growth and feeding behavior. So, like I said earlier, you know, plastics do impact organisms and wildlife. It's more visible and easier to understand when you see a whale washed up on the beach or a, or a albatross regurgitating plastic to their chick. Um, but even with the small microplastics, we see evidence from laboratory studies where they can impact an individual organism or even a population in the lab.

JOHN RAFFERTY:
But, as Dr. Rochman explains, microplastics are not just a problem for wildlife. They are likely affecting you and me as well. Studies have shown that the simple act of opening a soft-drink bottle can release microplastic fragments.

CHELSEA ROCHMAN:
Yeah, so, bottled water...I'm assuming you're talking about bottled water, but of course you would see this in like a bottle of Coca Cola or Snapple or whatever it is. But, um, we know that drinking water in general can have microplastic depending on its source. Right? So, bottled water is often just tap water. Um, sometimes it has extra filtration, but people have found that on average, bottled water tends to have more microplastic in it than tap water. And one of the types of microplastics that they see are sometimes fragments of, um, polyethylene, which is, uh, or polypropylene, sorry. So polyethylene or polypropylene is what the cap is made out of and then PET polyethylene terephthalate, which is what the bottle is made out of. So it has this edition of the microplastics leaching from the bottle, in addition to the plastic that may have already been in the water.

So, um, you know, I think people have this idea that drinking bottled water is cleaner than tap water. Um, but microplastics aside, it's less regulated. And, uh, and often it is just tap water and it's like buying, it's so much more expensive than the tap water that comes out of our tap. So it's always baffled me even before microplastics, but, um, certainly now with microplastics, seeing even greater concentration in the bottle of water, it's even more reason that in a location where you have clean water coming out of your tap, um, it just seems crazy to me to pay for a bottle of water. But anyways, you know, one of the things we really need to understand is what that means for human health.

JOHN RAFFERTY:
Dr. Rochman goes on to say that the problem of microplastics isn’t just a water pollution problem, it can be an air pollution problem too.

CHELSEA ROCHMAN:
Yeah. So we're still trying to understand that it was probably only in 2016, that the first paper came out that measured, uh, dust in wet deposition, which literally just means they measured microplastic in rain. Um, and so then we knew it was there. And then now there was a great paper that came out in the journal Science just a few weeks ago on microplastic raining down in national parks in the United States. And it was done in Utah. And what they found is that with rain, you had bigger particles coming down, but even during dry deposition. So just like your average dust coming down on a normal day at you had microplastic and the particles were smaller and the particles tended to be a similar size as dust. So this suggests that it's actually in global dust cycles. So not only is microplastic, uh, getting into the water cycle and raining down or snowing down, but it's also just transporting in the atmosphere with dry dust.

And so to me, this is fascinating. Um, how it happens, I think if multiple ways. You know, with sea spray, it could be that microplastics in the surface water are becoming entrained in the atmosphere. It might be that when we dry our clothes and there's a dryer vent outside of our house, it's emitting microplastics up into the dust that way. It could be that when I walk around, I have microplastics, I'll, you know, coming off my clothes and they're going into the dust. And I think it's probably all of these ways, right. Tire dust from roads gets in the dust near the street. Um, but it, you know, it, there's a couple papers now that are coming out where they're talking about the plastic cycle, just like we talked about other biogeochemical cycles. And, um, and I think that's smart because we are learning that they're in the atmosphere, they're in the, in long range transport in ocean currents. They're actually being used by organisms as a carbon source. So they sort of, you know, deserve to be thought of in this global planetary way.

JOHN RAFFERTY:
What about plastic recycling? So, it seems that in addition to the problem of biodiversity loss, the climate emergency, and pollution in general—plastic pollution is an emerging “environmental connector” that influences and is influenced by other large environmental problems.

How can we reduce plastic pollution? Wasn’t plastic recycling supposed to take care of this? Well, many of us recycle aluminum cans and other containers, because there’s a profit in it for us: We can take our soda cans down to a our local supermarket or recycling warehouse and receive money on the spot.

If plastics are valuable commodities, something like this process should happen to encourage the industry to make new plastic items from recycled plastic. Right now, this isn’t happening. Yes, some companies advertise that some amount of their products are made from recycled plastic bottles and other items, but they are often the exception to the rule. It’s still cheaper to make new products from virgin materials.

Evidence is emerging that plastic’s non-recyclability was known by the industry as early as the 1970s. Plastic was disposable by design, and any responsibility to reuse and recycle it was left to the consumer and the community; plastic manufacturers washed their hands of plastic waste. Dr. Altman notes that people are coming to realize this.

REBECCA ALTMAN:
There's a skepticism that recycling is the answer that we've been told it was. I mean, what's coming down the pike, I'm told from others who are working on these issues as you'll start to see what's called chemical recycling or incineration pyrolysis gasification as the new answer, which essentially means, you know, burn it and turn it into fuel. There's some major challenges with this. Pollution sources being one, but efficiency being another. Plastics is this industry in which supply and demand have their own logic. And it's not entirely clear to me that the public is demanding plastics at the level they're being produced. But it's also, it has to be bigger than just a consumer, or you know, individual waste management issue. It's seen as a societal issue, and so you see policies coming in to address that. You see more of a collective approach to addressing the problem of plastics.

And, so what we've come to understand recently is that in truth recycling hasn't been doing what we thought it would, that a very small percentage of plastics are recycled, than an even smaller percentage that we do recycle actually make it into some, you know, future life as a, as a different good. And, um, I think that realization has been hard, but also really important to make because it has helped different, uh, you know, has helped society understand that there has to be another way to address this problem. I'm really intersted to see where that develops. I think that to understand that the plastics problem is a collective one after decades of it being framed as an individual problem, you know, be a, be a good recycler don't litter.

I mean, those were industry campaigns that taught us how to recycle and, um, that funded the, uh, you know, keep America clean, keep America beautiful programs that, that we were taught by the industry, how to deal with plastics on an individual basis. And I think we're starting as a society to move past that. And to understand that, you know, this is, this shouldn't be on the taxpayer, um, to deal with this massive volume of plastic waste, that there is another way, which would, it would ask producers to be responsible for the materials that they are making.

JOHN RAFFERTY:
Still, it’s important to remember that the plastic recycling that many of us do already is having an effect, but Dr. Rochman notes that more needs to be done.

CHELSEA ROCHMAN:
Uh, well, let's start with the average person and then we'll talk about the corporate government level. I strongly believe this, there's no one size fits all silver bullet solution to this issue. Plastic comes from many different sources. It's used differently around the world. It's so versatile that there's a lot of different solutions. So you hear people talk about, um, you know, your average person can shift from single use products to more reusable materials like reusable water bottles and straws and cutlery. Um, those make a big difference. You know, 40% of the plastic produced goes into these single use items. So we are making a difference when we vote with our wallet that way. As people go out and do cleanups, some people say, Oh, that's just for education. Well, the reality is they do actually remove quite a bit of plastic off of the ground.

So there's a lot that you and I can do, but we can also write letters to our politicians and to the brands and companies that are producing this material. Because even though we, as individuals can act, the plastic economy, right, is way above I think what we have the power to do. And with the increase in population and increase in plastic production, we do need systemic change. Uh, there is a paper that came out recently that was led by Pew. Um, and it shows that, you know, you can't, we can't just do it by human will alone. And we can't just do it by, you know, just waste management or just reduction in production. So we need systemic change that prioritizes the circular economy. So we need to be using more recycled materials. We cannot have 10% recycled. We need to get that much higher.

Uh, we need waste management infrastructure all over the world. There's no reason why anyone should have to throw it in their backyard because they don't have curbside pick up, and we do need cleanups. So I'm a huge fan of, you know, Mr. Trash Wheel, if you haven't looked know what that is, look it up. Uh, sea bins, these types of, of, of, uh, technologies that sit at the end of river mouths or in harbors and prevent the material from getting further out into the lake or ocean. Um, so I think we need a combination of cleanup, waste management and plastic reduction. Uh, but we need to pull on each of those leavers so hard that it can't just be done by the people it needs to be done with maybe an international agreement at the United Nations level and, uh, mitigation or legislation at every level of government working with industry and then working with the people to produce or to consume and use the materials responsibly.

JOHN RAFFERTY:
All of us know that plastic is a triumph of chemistry and engineering. It touches all of our lives in the products that we use, and it’s beneficial in countless ways, but plastic has a dark side. Its manufacturing process is polluting, and plastic waste—whether it occurs in plastic bags, drink holders, or as bits and pieces of microplastic—is a growing environmental problem that affects sea life (already burdened by climate change, overfishing, and other forms of pollution) and human health.

All of us need to face the fact that the industry knew decades ago that recycling would be difficult, and it was likely never meant to be profitable.

So, what can we do about the planet’s plastic problem?

Dr. Altman and Dr. Rochman suggest that governments and industry join with the community to create a circular plastic economy--where plastic waste becomes the feedstock for new plastic products at all levels.

We need to rethink our plastic addiction. We need to stop ourselves when that plastic water bottle in the supermarket is calling out to us on a hot day. We need to plan ahead and opt for a reusable bottle instead. Instead of single-use plastic bags for our meals, we should store our food in reusable containers. We need to be brave enough to vote with our wallets and not patronize the companies that insist on wrapping their goods in so much plastic.
As we reduce our dependence on traditional plastic—we can shift to other materials that do the same thing, but without the toxic side effects. These ideas are not new. Some even date to the days of Henry Ford.

REBECCCA ALTMAN:
A lot of what's old is new again. You can see the backbone of some new plastics material returning to the carbohydrates. By that, I mean, plant-based, um, for example, uh, corn. I've even heard proposals for, you know, potato based plastics, of silk based plastics. Um, so just, you know, just shifting of the carbon base. This is interesting insomuch as green chemists and chemists in general are designing, um, legacy out of the molecules, but also designing toxicity out. It's no good to continue to just change the, the backbone, the carbon backbone, but still build toxic molecules with them. In that the toxicity question, the, um, persistence question, the bioaccumulation questioning these all have to be considered at the design stage.

But I will say that if you go into the archives into history, you'll see, like, for example, Ford himself believed in the soybean. He had a massive vision of a soy-based car with soy-based paints and soy-based plastics, and soy-based fuel, you know there's nothing new here. Just the idea that these chemistries interact and that, you know, we, you know, the, the carbohydrate based plastic was a thing of the past. It very well could become something of the future that we could use our, our kind of increasing humility, uh, and understanding of the ways that chemistry is in our lives to design better materials.

JOHN RAFFERTY:
Plastic pollution is a tangible threat—possibly one that is contributing to the extinction of some forms of life, especially in marine environments, and it’s an emerging threat to many other species—including our own.

I hope that you can appreciate how plastics are made and the challenges these materials pose to our waste stream and the biosphere in general.

This episode caused us to question our own experience with plastic. I hope it also made you think about your own plastic dependence—while at the same time shedding light on solutions. Industry and government will need to take much larger roles to solve this problem.

Don’t forget, you can catch up on anything you might have missed on Britannica.com. Learn more about extinction and its causes from our article located at mainten.top/science/extinction-biology.

There, you can also find other parts of this podcast series. More information on plastics, microplastics, recycling, and pollution can be found at mainten.top.

The Dark Side of the Plastic Age: Story by: John Rafferty. Produced by: Kurt Heintz. Special thanks to Drs. Rebecca Altman and Chelsea Rochman for their contributions to this episode.

This is the tenth part of the “Postcards from the 6th Mass Extinction” series. This program is copyrighted by Encyclopaedia Britannica Incorporated. All Rights Reserved.